What would happen if you asked twenty top writers who don’t normally write about Sherlock Holmes, to write about Sherlock Holmes? And what if these great writers read that proposal and decided that yes, they did have that kind of tale in the back of their minds? Why, you’d have: A Study in Sherlock, Stories…
Read MoreRejoin Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes in their eleventh adventure together, Pirate King, coming September 6, 2011. This time, the intrepid pair enters the frenetic world of silent films, where the pirates are real and the shooting isn’t all done with cameras. Click here for updates on Pirate King, Laurie’s thoughts on writing it, a…
Read MoreGood fiction is active. (I tell myself this as I slog through a first draft that feels about as active as mud. Mud can be active, right? Certainly anyone who has lived downhill from a mudslide would say so.) But yes, good fiction is active. This is why writers are told to avoid the passive…
Read MoreToday’s subject is deadlines, and the breaking thereof. Not really, although I do mean to post on Wednesdays, and this week got away from me. Writer’s Wednesdays (or in this case, Thursday) here on Mutterings are my musings on various aspects of the writer’s trade and life. This week: a venture into e-publication. ** Last…
Read MoreToday’s Wednesday on Writing will be brief, since I am in New York for The Edgars, and not only is writing on the iPad a laborious process, I also hit the ground running and have little time for a leisurely reflection on the writing process. Today I will be on a panel in the Edgars…
Read MoreToday is Writing Wednesday here at Mutterings, and the day’s topic is the role of coincidence in crime fiction. Some of you will guess by this that I’ve been reading Kate Atkinson. Her latest Jackson Brodie story, Started Early, Took the Dog, is the fourth in what is dutifully described as a series, following the…
Read MoreAn academic’s love letter to the stacks, to mark National Library Week. Now, I’m as appreciative as the next obsessive-compulsive recovering-academic of the vast riches of material becoming available online, thanks to all those Google scanners crouched in the basements of libraries around the world, madly feeding books through their machines. I download obscure tomes…
Read MoreHappy National Library Week! I had an impressive tour of the Santa Cruz library last week, from check-in to donations collection. I’ve also had a haul of books from the university library, building blocks for the story I’m working on. Both reminded me how much I love and depend on libraries. Don’t go to your…
Read MoreRather, on non-writing. One of the most frustrating things about being a writer is when you can’t. I’m not talking about being blocked by internal inabilities—“writer’s block.” I’m talking about what Lao Tse (he must have raised small children) called the “the ten thousand things.” I was spinning along just fine with the current novel—working…
Read MoreI was going to talk about research today, but HRF Keating has died, a friend and a writer I admired tremendously, and so this Wednesday’s Mutterings will be about him. I met Harry when I was a very new writer, at a conference in Scottsdale. A couple years later, he came to the Monterey BoucherCon with…
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